0Clever Dancing Colors by Fabian Oefner

If Jack Long has breathtaking drops of paint while Mark Mawson has amazing aqueous electreau, then here comes another artist who keenly experimented with colors and the results are just as fantastic and uniquely different. Switzerland-based professional photographer Fabian Oefner dubbed his series Dancing Colors (making sound waves visible) literally because he captures color pigments as they dance to the beat of a speaker.

The artist says:

The idea of the series is to build a bridge between the acoustical and the visual world. the sculptures, you see on the images exist only for a fraction of a second. they consist of normal salt, colored with pigments. the salt is placed on a thin foil of plastic, which is wrapped on top of a speaker. as soon as the speaker receives a sound, the plastic foil starts to vibrate, forming these strange figures.

In order to capture the specific moment, where the pigments are lifted into the air, I attached a microphone to the speaker, which is again connected to the flash system. As soon as the speaker emits a sound, the microphone picks it up and sends a signal to the flashes to trigger them. Since I took the images in a completely darkened room, i can just leave the shutter open for a few seconds, only the event illuminated by the triggered flashes is captured.

The shooting is very time-consuming since one has to clean the whole setup after every shot. It`s also a very messy business, everybody, who has ever worked with color pigments knows what i mean.